gdanmitchell wrote:
1985 for me, though I did use a very early IBM (literally) PC before that. And before that? A PDP11. It is a bit of a story…
Yup the IBM was my first venture into computing. 8088 processor with 2 - 5 1/2" floppy drives, a rudimentary graphics card, green screen monitor and an Okidata printer that was built like a tank. Cost was well over $5,000. Hard Drives did not exist. When they did come available it was only 5 MB, they were huge, weighed a bunch and cost over $700.
Apple marketing is so powerful, they even convince people that computers with Mac operating system aren't personal computers, that only computers with the Windows operating system are personal computers.
I have maxed out my RAM usage with very large Lightroom Classic Imports and no other program running other than the system monitor program. I have 64GB of RAM. I have my M3 MacBook Pro M3 Max plugged into a 140 watt charger and when running PhotoSweeper to eliminate duplicates, it reaches 1400% CPU usage for hours on end with very large deduplication request. Interesting how it handles this. The charge goes down to 7% and then up to around 14% and continues this cycle until complete. You do have to turn off automatic updates when running long processes… at least, I have always turned them off. I was trying to pull images from 10TB of images/movies which were orginally on a NAS and get rid of duplicates. These were 20 years of backing up over 20 computers from everyone in the family, including a picture of every meal ever consumed by my wife.. I’ve yet to workup the courage to extract images from my Synology Drive backup that sits on a NAS. It is over 37TB. In fact, yesterday I started moving this folder to a replacement, new Synology NAS using Terminal on my Mac. It took a long time to get all parameters on both NAS set properly, but eventually Grok got me sorted and now, for the next five days, rsync is moving the backup to the new NAS. These are all extreme cases that I never anticipated, but I wonder how RAM size influences functioning of LRC and other programs. I’ve now started a project to place all movies, at least the BluRay and BluRay 4k on a new primary Ugreen NAS and all of 20 years of home video to be streamed at full resolution at home and over the Internet via Jellifin. Again, I used Grok to sort out what components to purchase to meet my NAS objectives. This required quite a bit of back and forth, but it has helped me to understand these NAS and how to set them up. I believe that a good AI agent is a great tool (not the last word) in when you can clearly state your objectives so that the AI agent has something to work with. The good news is that you can stream full resolution 4K content via Internet without the heavy compression seen with streaming services. The bad news is that a majority of 4K Ultra movies are just 2K upscales.. OK.. done .. Just wanted to convey the usefulness of RAM & AI.
MIRANDA1 wrote:
1985, WOW that was really early, I only got into MACs a bit later, prior to that I was on PCs, including my first laptop, a Toshiba 3200 which was the size of a small carry-on suitcase it had a horrendous orange gas plasma display but was absolutely cutting edge back in the late 80s.
Commodore pet in the late 70’s before getting an IBM PC in 82. Prior to that in the mid 70’s I spent many a night boot strapping the pdp 11 OS off of ticker tape before being able to use the machine.
